Performance Marketing with Fexingo: Paid Ads, ROAS, and Direct Response Conversations

Lucas and Luna uncover a silent ROAS killer in Amazon PPC: ignoring dayparting. Using real data from a kitchen gadget seller, they show how blanket ad schedules waste up to 30% of spend during low-conversion hours. Lucas breaks down the math of adjusting bids by time-of-day using Amazon's portfolio bid adjustments, and Luna shares a counterintuitive finding from a pet brand that saw higher ROAS at...

Episode 31 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo dives into the hidden force quietly eating your Amazon PPC budget: algorithmic third-party buyers using repricing software and aggressive bid strategies to win the top of search. Lucas and Luna break down how a $4.50 bid on 'wireless earbuds' can lose to a reseller bidding $6.00 because they're playing a different game — margin on volume vs. margin...

Lucas and Luna expose the silent ROAS killer hiding in plain sight on Amazon: the 'other' search term row in your Search Query Report. Most sellers optimize only the top 100 search terms and ignore the long tail — a bucket that can represent 60% of total spend with a ROAS 40% below account average. Lucas walks through a real client example where a pet-supply brand was bleeding $14,000 a month on 1...

Most performance marketers assume brand bidding is a waste — you'd convert anyway, right? But new data from a 2025 Google Ads study across 1,200 e-commerce accounts shows that pausing brand campaigns can actually cost you 12-18% of total revenue. Lucas and Luna break down when brand bidding defends against competitor conquesting, how the 'free clicks' assumption breaks in competitive verticals, an...

Episode 28 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo tackles the elephant in the room: Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework and how it shattered Facebook ad performance after iOS 14.5. Lucas and Luna break down why traditional pixel-based optimization broke, how the 'Aggregated Event Measurement' model capped conversions at 8 per campaign, and why ROAS on iOS traffic dropped 30-40% for ma...

Episode 27 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo tackles a seasonal problem that burns millions in ad spend: Amazon PPC bid inflation during Q4. Lucas and Luna break down the specific mechanics — how increased competitor demand drives up bids, why your ACOS can double overnight, and a concrete pre-season strategy using dynamic bidding and negative keywords to protect ROAS. They walk through real b...

Episode 26 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo dives into a specific, overlooked data set inside Amazon Brand Analytics that most advertisers ignore: the 'Repeat Purchase Behaviour' and 'Item Comparison' reports. Lucas and Luna break down how these two reports reveal the true long-term value of your ad spend, beyond the last-click attribution window. Using a concrete example of a mid-tier kitche...

Lucas and Luna dig into the hidden cost of broad match keywords in Google Ads. By mid-2026, advertisers are seeing 30%+ of budgets eaten by irrelevant queries that pass the Quality Score check. They break down why the old 'broad match plus modified' workaround is gone, how phrase match now acts like broad, and the one search query report filter that reveals the real waste. Lucas shares a case from...

Lucas and Luna dig into Amazon DSP bids and why most advertisers are overpaying by as much as 30 percent. They break down the difference between open auction and Amazon's private marketplace, explain why your bid multiplier on 'in-market' audiences is a leak, and walk through a real example from a mid-six-figure brand that cut its cost per click by 22 percent just by adjusting bid strategy by time...

Lucas and Luna dig into a hidden ROAS killer: the attribution window. Most advertisers use a default seven-day click-through, one-day view-through window set by platforms. But that window can be wildly wrong for different purchase cycles. Lucas walks through a hardware DTC brand that saw a 40 percent ROAS lift just by switching to a fourteen-day click-through window, because their customers resear...

Lucas and Luna dig into a specific performance marketing blind spot: how YouTube ad frequency is silently destroying your ROAS even when view-through rates look healthy. Using a case study from a DTC skincare brand that ran a $500k YouTube campaign, they break down the math behind frequency caps, the difference between linear TV and digital frequency psychology, and why YouTube's own reporting too...

Lucas and Luna dig into Amazon's bid adjustment feature for placements, devices, and audiences. Lucas reveals how a DTC skincare brand lost 22% of its ROAS by letting default bid adjustments run unchecked on Amazon Sponsored Products. They walk through three specific adjustment traps: over-bidding on 'top of search' placements, ignoring the 'rest of search' conversion delta, and blanket device adj...

Campaign Budget Optimization — CBO — was supposed to be Meta's gift to advertisers. Let the algorithm shift spend toward the winning ad sets automatically. But in practice, CBO often does the opposite: it funnels budget into high-spend, high-frequency ad sets that have already peaked in performance, starving newer creative or audiences that could actually convert. In this episode, Lucas walks thro...

Most advertisers think search term reports tell them exactly what keywords triggered their ads. Lucas and Luna uncover how Google and Microsoft Ads actually group search queries into aggregates, hiding the real terms burning budget. They walk through the case of an outdoor gear brand that found 22 percent of spend went to irrelevant long-tail queries that looked relevant in the report. You'll lear...

Episode 18 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo challenges the assumption that Google Ads Smart Bidding always optimizes for the best ROAS. Lucas and Luna dissect a real example of a mid-market e-commerce brand spending $80,000 per month on Google Shopping. They reveal how Smart Bidding's target ROAS strategy can get stuck in local maxima, leaving ad budget unspent and missing incremental convers...

Lucas and Luna dive into a specific performance marketing blind spot: Instagram Reels ads underperforming feed ads on ROAS, even though Reels get more reach. They break down the data from a real DTC brand that ran a controlled split test over Q1 2026—Reels had a 40 percent lower ROAS than feed despite costing 30 percent less CPM. The hosts explain the structural reasons: Reels compete for attentio...

Most performance marketers assume Google's automated bidding is optimizing for ROAS—but the algorithms are actually optimizing for Google's revenue. In this episode, Lucas and Luna unpack the structural conflict hidden inside Smart Bidding: how target CPA and target ROAS strategies inflate bids when competition is high, why Google's machine learning rewards high-spend accounts, and what you can do...

Episode 15 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo. Lucas and Luna break down why most advertisers focus on bidding and audiences when the real ROAS lever is creative. They walk through a 2025 case study from a direct-to-consumer brand that tested five creative concepts, kept targeting and budget identical, and saw a 340 percent swing in return on ad spend between the best and worst performers. Luca...

In this episode of Performance Marketing with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna tackle a common yet costly blind spot: conversion rate optimization (CRO) tunnel vision. They dissect a real e-commerce case where a brand obsessed with button color tests and form fields actually lost 23% of revenue per visitor because they ignored the bigger picture. Using data from a mid-market DTC brand that spent $1.2 milli...

Lucas and Luna break down why most brand deals with YouTubers fail to deliver a positive ROAS — and how a DTC mattress company fixed it. Using a real example from Q1 2026, they walk through the three-step framework: discount-code attribution, survey-based lift measurement, and cohort tracking over 90 days. They explain why vanity metrics like views and likes are worthless, and why the real signal...

Episode 12 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo dives into a pattern plaguing DTC brands: TikTok ads that crush it at $500/day but collapse at $5,000/day. Lucas and Luna unpack the real culprit — not the algorithm, but ad fatigue across TikTok's unique creative burn rate. They walk through actual data from a skincare brand that hit 4.5x ROAS at small spend, then watched it crater to 1.2x after sc...

Episode 11 of Performance Marketing with Fexingo. Lucas and Luna dive into Google Ads Quality Score and why it's not the metric you think it is. Lucas reveals how a simple test on a client's campaign showed a high Quality Score but terrible conversion rates, and explains why the score measures ad relevance to the keyword, not actual user experience. They discuss how optimizing for Quality Score al...

Lucas and Luna dive into the hidden inefficiencies of retargeting campaigns. They unpack the 'dormant customer trap' using a real-world case from a $50 million DTC brand that was wasting 30 percent of its ad spend on users who would never convert again. They break down recency-based segmentation, frequency fatigue, and why the old '30-day cookie window' is a relic. If you run performance marketing...

Lucas and Luna dig into the CPM creep that's silently eating performance marketing budgets in mid-2026. They break down why auction dynamics—not algorithm changes—are driving up costs, using the case of a DTC brand that saw CPMs jump 40% while conversion rates stayed flat. Lucas explains how platform consolidation and the rise of AI-generated content are inflating impression supply, and shares a c...

Lucas and Luna break down a hidden inefficiency in Amazon PPC: the search term isolation problem. Using the example of a mid-size supplement brand spending $40k/month on Sponsored Products, they explain how keyword match types bleed budget into branded queries you'd convert organically. Luna brings data showing that up to 30% of Amazon ad spend goes to terms that would rank top-3 organically. Luca...